4 ms·

It seems to me, they solve different problems: one is about finding a document Foo, the other is about finding information in a document Foo, assuming you alrea

by Crito 13y ago

It seems to me, they solve different problems: one is about finding a document Foo, the other is about finding information in a document Foo, assuming you already have Foo. The hyperlink equivalent would be "you can find this book at this library in this town, as of the time this was written". I imagine that in real life lawyers don't need to worry about that sort of instruction because those books are printed and widely distributed across the country, while on the web documents tend to exist in only a single location, maintained by a single person or organization. USENET might be the closest on the internet we have gotten to that sort of distribution model.

rayiner 13y ago
Citations can refer to the document as a whole. E.g. 410 U.S. 113 (1973) refers to the case Roe v. Wade. It's equivalent to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade. 410 U.S. 113, 153 is a pin-cite to the quote "This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." It's similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade#Right_to_privacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade#Right_to_privacy. The difference is that a citation is a reference to an immutable object. No matter what happens to Roe v. Wade, say it is overruled, the document at 410 U.S. 113 won't change. A URL on the other hand is a reference to a location. Like with the memory address pointed-to by a C pointer, what is at that location can change. One can imagine a system of hyperlinks that behaved differently. In this system, a URL would uniquely identify an immutable document. A new version of a document would get a new URL, and servers would be required by the protocol to preserve all previous versions of the document. This is essentially the premise of Git: every blob is stored forever and different revisions are stored as deltas such that older versions always remain accessible.
- mietek 13y ago
  One can, and one should. We should build this system, keeping in mind the lessons of Project Xanadu. http://mesh.is/draft http://mesh.is/draft

by Crito 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago

Citations can refer to the document as a whole. E.g. 410 U.S. 113 (1973) refers to the case Roe v. Wade. It's equivalent to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade. 410 U.S. 113, 153 is a pin-cite to the quote "This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." It's similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade#Right_to_privacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade#Right_to_privacy. The difference is that a citation is a reference to an immutable object. No matter what happens to Roe v. Wade, say it is overruled, the document at 410 U.S. 113 won't change. A URL on the other hand is a reference to a location. Like with the memory address pointed-to by a C pointer, what is at that location can change. One can imagine a system of hyperlinks that behaved differently. In this system, a URL would uniquely identify an immutable document. A new version of a document would get a new URL, and servers would be required by the protocol to preserve all previous versions of the document. This is essentially the premise of Git: every blob is stored forever and different revisions are stored as deltas such that older versions always remain accessible.

mietek 13y ago
One can, and one should. We should build this system, keeping in mind the lessons of Project Xanadu. http://mesh.is/draft http://mesh.is/draft